Then you’re underneath, and some of the shadows detach themselves from the walls and a tall kid with a blond crew cut and a broken nose pushes Wayne up against the sooty cinder-blocks and says: Give us some money.
Let me alone.
You try to run, but a fat guy with greasy black Hair grabs you and throws you against the wall next to your brother. His left eyelid is uttering up and down nervously and he says: Come on, kid, how much you got?
F-four cents.
You fuckin’ liar.
Wayne tries to twist free and a guy with odd, orange-coloured hair helps the blond one to hold him. The guy with the jittery eyelid suddenly bashes you one in the mouth. You feel a sudden heaviness in your groin, and a dark patch appears on your jeans.
Look, Vinnie, he wet himself!
Wayne’s struggles become frenzied, and he almost – not – quite – gets free.
Another guy, wearing black chinos and a white T-shirt, throws him back. There is a small strawberry birthmark on his chin. The stone throat of the overpass is beginning to tremble. The metal girders pick up a thrumming vibration. Train coming.
Someone strikes the books out of your hands and the kid with the birthmark on his chin kicks them into the gutter. Wayne suddenly kicks out with his right foot, and it connects with the crotch of the kid with the jittery face. He screams.
Vinnie, he’s gettin’ away!
The kid with the jittery face is screaming about his nuts, but even his howls are lost in the gathering, shaking roar of the approaching train. Then it is over them, and its noise fills the world.
Light flashes on switchblades. The kid with the blond crew cut is holding one and Birthmark has the other. You can’t hear Wayne, but his words are in the shape of his lips:
Run Jimmy Run.
You slip to your knees and the hands holding you are gone and you skitter between a pair of legs like a frog. A hand slaps down on your back, groping for purchase, and gets none. Then you are running back the way you came, with all of the horrible sludgy slowness of dreams. You look back over your shoulder and see -He woke in the dark, Sally sleeping peacefully beside him. He bit back the scream, and when it was throttled, he fell back.
When he had looked back, back into the yawning darkness of the overpass, he had seen the blond kid and the birthmarked kid drive their knives into his brother – Blondie’s below the breast-bone, and Birthmark’s directly into his brother’s groin.
He lay in the darkness, breathing harshly, waiting for that nine-year-old ghost to depart, waiting for honest sleep to blot it all away.
An unknown time later, it did.
The Christmas vacation and semester break were combined in the city’s school district, and the holiday was almost a month long. The dream came twice, early on, and did not come again. He and Sally went to visit her sister in Vermont, and skied a great deal. They were happy.
Jim’s Living with Lit problem seemed inconsequential and a little foolish in the open, crystal air. He went back to school with a winter tan, feeling cool and collected.
Simmons caught him on the way to his period-two class and handed him a folder.
‘New student, period seven. Name is Robert Lawson. Transfer.’
‘Hey, I’ve got twenty-seven in there right now, Sim. I’m overloaded.’
‘You’ve still got twenty-seven. Bill Stearns got killed the Tuesday after Christmas. Car accident. Hit-and-run.’
‘Billy?’
The picture formed in his mind in black and white, like a senior photograph.
William Stearns, Key Club 1, Football 1,2, Pen & Lance, 2. He had been one of the few good ones in Living with Lit. Quiet, consistent A’s and B’s on his exams. Didn’t volunteer often, but usually summoned the correct answers (laced with a pleasing dry wit) when called on. Dead? Fifteen years old. His own mortality suddenly whispered through his bones like a cold draught under a door.
‘Christ, that’s awful. Do they know what happened?’
‘Cops are checking into it. He was downtown exchanging a Christmas present.